A Killer`s Death In The Bronx Causes A Thing Of Beauty

April 28, 1986|By Jimmy Breslin, New York Daily News.

NEW YORK — One of the walls in the upstairs room in the funeral parlor was mirrored so that when you walked in you thought you saw two bodies, but it was only one, Sal Agron, who died last Tuesday a day short of his 44th birthday. He had on a white suit and brown tie as he lay in the casket at the La Paz Funeral Home in the Bronx. His face was puffy and there was a goatee on the chin. There was no sound in the room, but all you could remember were the screams from that day in 1959.

``Why did you kill him?`` the reporters asked.

``Sal! Sal! Tell us how you did it!``

He was a skinny little kid of 16 who was in handcuffs in the old W. 47th Street stationhouse. He had stabbed to death two youngsters he thought were in a white gang in a playground on W. 45th Street, near Ninth Ave., which was considered a slum neighborhood. Agron stabbed them in the back with a 12-inch silver Mexican dagger, and he wore a black cape with a red lining. He was immediately called ``the Capeman.``

``Why did you stab them?`` another voice shouted in the packed stationhouse. They held microphones to his face.

Now Agron looked at somebody, I`m pretty sure it was Jimmy Cannon, who wrote sports for the old Journal-American and was at the arrest to give it dressing-room color, and Sal Agron looked at him and said, ``I feel like killing you!``

A thrill went through the filthy old police station. The reporters pushed and taunted him some more. I know that at some time in there, Sal Agron said, ``I don`t care if I burn; my mother could watch me.``

As Agron stood in the police station, the governor, Rockefeller, held a special meeting in his office about the new emergency in juvenile crime.

Agron was born in Puerto Rico. His mother was an illiterate orphan who, at 13, eloped with a street cleaner. When the street cleaner beat her with a machete, she went to an asylum for the poor, which kept the mother and son separated. Sal Agron was suffering from malnutrition and could not walk until he was 2 1/2. In the orphanage, Sal Agron started collecting razor blades and slashed himself. He said he heard voices, including that of a dog, who told him what to do. He had an IQ of 68 and he couldn`t read or wtite when, at age 10, he came to New York on the late-night flight they called the kikiryki, because it was a midnight flight, the time roosters in Puerto Rico start crowing. When he arrived at the old Idlewild Airport, there was nobody to pick him up. He stood in the airport for hours, a youngster who heard voices and had tried to slash himself. Finally, comebody contacted his mother, who came to the airport, and she brought him to the streets of Manhattan, where he was in and out of reform schools, was listed as mentally disturbed and joined a homosexual street gang on the West Side and, on Aug. 30, 1959, turned into the most notorious teenager killer of his time.

There were 390 murders in New York that year.

Agron was sentenced to the electric chair, but the sentence was commuted in 1960, one week before he was to die, when the judge and district attorney told the governor that they felt Agron was deranged. He then served about 20 years in prison. He was released in 1979. He read Oscar Wilde and was in a film. Nowhere does it say that the families of the two he killed ever forgave him. He lived in the Bronx with diabetes and died of a heart attack.

At 3 p.m. last Wednesday, when the viewing of his body was supposed to begin at the La Paz, the upstairs room was empty by 4 p.m., still nobody was there.

Downstairs, a guy came in from the rain on E. 149th Street. He carried a folding chair and a cane, both wrapped in plastic. He showed them to John, who was in charge of the funeral parlor.

``I settle for $10,`` the guy said.

``I give you $6,`` John said.

``My back and legs hurt, that`s why they give me this with the Medicare,`` the guy said.

``I give you $8,`` John said.

The guy shook his head. He picked up his stuff and walked out.

John a couple of others stood at the glass front door of the La Paz and wetched the rain on the empty street. A sign on the office wall said that all funerals are to be paid the night before the burial. ``No personal checks.``

``They should be here by now,`` John said.

Now a young couple, a wonderful looking couple, walked through the rain and into the La Paz. He had short dark hair and wore a new tan raincoat and brown tie. She was willowy and had curly hair that was cut short. Her dark eyes were beautiful. She had on an expensive looking dark coat buttoned to the neck.

``Agron?`` she said.

``Upstairs,`` John said.

``Are you with the family?`` she was asked.

She nodded. ``He is my uncle,`` she said. She introduced herself as Stacy Miller and said she was 24 and that she now lived in New Jersey. The young man introduced himself as Joe Aponte. He said he was 32, and that his family was from Intervale Avenue in the Bronx, but now he lived in New Jersey. He said he worked in the record business.